Is Unforgettable a Procedural To Remember? Our Fall TV First Impression:

The networks have more than 30 shows debuting this fall, including 2 Broke Girls, one New Girl, and Charlie’s fresh formation of Angels. To help you prepare for it all, TVLine is offering First Impressions based on the not-for-review pilots. Next up…

THE SET-UP | Carrie Wells (played by Montgomery) has hyperthymesia — or a super-duper, Marilu Henner-like memory. That made her a helluva cop at one time, but it also cost her a serious relationship. Walsh plays Al Burns, a NYPD detective who used to be Carrie’s partner back in Syracuse — and her aforementioned lover. When a neighbor of Carrie’s gets murdered in Queens, she and Al are reunited after a nine-year estrangement, and he enlists her mad skills to crack the case. Is this the start of another beautiful partnership? Oh, and irony alert: Carrie is haunted by the one memory she cannot piece together, involving the death of her sister when they were kids.

THE GOOD |Unforgettable — which at one stage carried the regrettable title of The Rememberer, I kid you not — does offer up a slightly new-ish take on the standard CBS procedural, as Carrie’s steel trap of a brain catches people in lies or culls crime-scene irregularities. Montgomery and Walsh deliver convincing banter as mutually scorned ex-lovers. Though not set in Syracuse (aka the home of my college alma mater), there’s enough name-checking to make an Orangeman proud. Montgomery is quite possibly the most attractive person on primetime TV this season.

THE… COULD-BE-BETTER | When Carrie “steps outside” herself to revisit her memory of a crime scene, yes, it gives us double the Poppy, but it’s 10 percent hokey. Plus, how often can she be a witness to that week’s case?…. I don’t have a refined ear for such things, but several critics have fixated on the Aussie Montgomery’s American accent…. Hey, why not set it in Syracuse? Plenty of bad stuff goes on upstate, trust me — especially when the men’s hoops team loses the title to a Keith Smart jump shot.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE |Unforgettable doesn’t break any hugely new ground, but perhaps it doesn’t need to. For one, it’s capping a night fueled by the NCIS shows, so it’s thematically more on-point that Good Wife ever was in this time slot. Plus, it brings Montgomery and Walsh back to TV. Ultimately, success may be determined by who can retain more of their beefy lead-in: Unforgettable or ABC’s Body of Proof (which follows the Dancing With the Stars results show). Perhaps in CBS’ favor is the sparse buzz that the latest DWTS casting rumors have generated.

“The Rememberer” is a pretty bad title, but “Unforgettable” is at least as bad (for different reasons). Mainly because it’s so nondescript. It’s like all those bland, almost meaningless movie titles crime and legal thriller films have had for the last 20 years or so. They’d be better off calling it “The Eidetective” or “Detective Elephant” or something cutesy like that.

This show looks and sounds terrible. There are going to be coincidences galore…another procedural that will explain everything with tons of exposition. And why do they have to be ex-lovers? So people can sit and cheer for them to get together, just like the fans of all the CBS procedurals cheer for this one and that one to finally get together….

i concur. the idea of having a protagonist with hyperthymesia is intriguing, but the rest of the premise pretty much lost me. On top of that, i’m under 60, so the tone of most of CBS’ dramas irks the heck out of me. I’ll check it out to see if it’s better than i think, but i have pretty low expectations. And since CBS doesn’t have OnDemand in my area, if anything else is on at the same time that i like, too bad Unforgettable.

i’ve heard several inflections over the years on Without a Trace. there are words she says “funny” and many times she’d complete a whole line as an Aussie. i always wondered why no one called her on it…
maybe in these interviews, she’s deliberately trying to cover it up?

Is it me or has CBS just copied two different versions of USA’s PSYCH in two seperate shows. Unforgetable seems to be stealing Shawn Spencer knack for remembering the most minute details, while The Mentalist steals the quirky nature of a police consultant. CBS really seems to be keeping up with all the fresh new ideas.

You aren’t getting it. It doesn’t matter if it was a learned technique or inherited. The point is…they are ALL THE SAME. All three shows have a main character who uses their enhanced observation skills to help the cops catch bad guys. Been there. Done that. Boring!

I like Poppy Montgomery alot from WAT and also Dylan Walsh, so I will check this out. But, as far as the competition goes, I think Body of Proof will win the timeslot and this will finish 2nd. Sadly, I love Parenthood, but it will finish 3rd with about 5-6M viewers like last season. Sons of Anarchy isn’t a factor since it’s on cable.

Parenthood’s a wonderful show – and their demos in 18-49 are good. Good enough to screw with The Good Wife’s demos enough to send it to Sunday night. I love the Bravermans, that’s what I’ll be watching.

^^THIS! And why do they have to be ‘former lovers, working together’? Sounds like Jack and Samantha from Without a Trace – cue the angst and insert eyeroll here!!! I used to like Poppy early on in WAT – she was so natural and fresh – but not any more. She looks botoxed and plastic, just like her former WAT co-star Roselyn Sanchez. Oh and how long before Mr Montgomery, Adam Kaufman, gets a recurring role on the show? (Insert another eyeroll here)

These columns are forcing me to watch shows I previously had no intention of watching. In this case, I plan to at least give it a shot for Kevin Rankin. He was great in FNL and even great in the bad show, Trauma.

I like Poppy Montgomery and Dylan Walsh, and I watch the NCIS franchise that will be on before. But, I really like Body of Proof, so I’ll probably be DVRing Unforgettable and see if it’s good enough to keep on the DVR list.

Love the idea of this show and love Poppy. She was great in Without a Trace which I loved with all my heart. Great to see her back. She was one of those actresses that I was meh about at first but came of love over the years.

Ditto. The out of body experience was where it lost me. She’s decent to look at, but her accent is distracting. Reminds me of Anna Torv of Fringe for sure in accent and delivery.
I’m sure it’ll do fine because most things on CBS do, but I’m definitely going to pass on it because it just doesn’t seem interesting enough. You can tell they were trying hard to make it interesting (out of body experience! ex-lover and co-worker! sister’s murder!), but it just turns out to be far too cliche. Meh.

Will be watching PARENTHOOD. How very much like tvline to not even mention Parenthood in the last paragraph. *rollingmyeyes* Which show beat Body of Proof in the all-important demos with their season finale? Parenthood. It’s time Ausiello and Mitovich started giving Lauren Graham and Peter Krause the attention they deserve.

UNFORGETTABLE is one of the worst crime dramas I can’t even remember, in case you know it by now. PARENTHOOD and BODY OF PROOF have high hopes in the same timeslot but not this Poppy Montgomery-lead series.

I think the things that bugs me the most are that she can’t remember the most important day of her life and that she has a super memory and never forgets anything while her mother has Alzheimer’s. I predicted these two were gonna be huge plot points as soon as I read that she has a photographic memory. I like Poppy and adore Dylan from Nip/Tuck but I doubt I’ll be a regular viewer of this show unless there’s nothing else on tv at the same time.